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Cream Onions

Cream Onions is a dish of onions cooked in milk, butter, starch, parsley, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions in two waters.

  2. Drain and cut large onions into quarters.

Make the creamed onions

  1. Pour scalding milk over the onions, adding a pinch of baking soda.

  2. Set over the fire and add butter, corn-starch mixed with milk, parsley, pepper, and salt.

  3. Simmer for three minutes and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Form the body of the dish, becoming soft and sweet when boiled and simmered.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that forms a creamy sauce around the onions.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Corn-starch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce body so it clings to the onions.

The step that matters

Adding the corn-starch mixture. Corn-starch must be mixed with milk first and added to hot liquid while stirring; lumps form if it is dropped in dry, and starch only thickens fully once the mixture simmers.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, corn, parsley, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, corn, parsley, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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